Many companies offer hosting services to provide customers with a secure, robust and flexible infrastructure in which to host a variety of applications for example web applications such as on-line banking, on-line shopping, information services and hosting service such as ‘pay for used capacity’ which, enable a customer to only pay for the processing power that they use and allows the customer to deploy the most up-to-date equipment in a cost effective manner. Hosting services provide many businesses with an alternative solution to building and running their technology infrastructure in-house by tapping into computer systems in other company's data centers to provide the management of software applications and hardware resources such as servers. The management and administration of these servers and services provide a tremendous challenge to many hosting companies, as a key problem with the management and administration of the servers within an environment such as a server farm is the rigid infrastructure and architecture of the servers due to the definition of roles the servers play in relation to the data the servers are publishing.
The rigid allocation of a resource to for example, a web server which supports a particular customer's product can result in an under utilized yet expensive web server resource not being used to it's full capability, while other web servers supporting other products are stretched to the point of breaking. Further today's current state of the art web server software is complex and flexible and can be configured and extended through Application Protocol Interfaces (API) to facilitate powerful processing beyond the standard serving of basic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) pages. However current deployment practices and technologies require that the web servers are configured manually using either configuration files or binary registries and thus remain static during their operation, handling requests for a specific website or websites. When an additional or a different resource for a particular HTML page or a different web site URL needs publishing or a need arises for a new server to be added to, or removed from a server pool, the servers must be restarted for any change to take effect. This requires a tremendous administration effort on the part of the server farm administrator because it takes a considerable amount of time to manually configure a server and it is not always convenient to shut down a server and restart the server to allow for any changes to take effect as this can cause loss of service for a period of time.
US patent application publication US 2002/0002602 (2602) describes a system for serving web pages to a client in response to a client request specifying a resource that aims to serve a web page in a coordinated fashion from multiple cooperating web servers and maintaining a reliable connection so that the server and clients remain synchronized and information is not lost. In order for the above to take place such that a web server processes a URL and associates the URL with a data source, the web server will require manual intervention and the web server will have to be shut down and restarted for the changes to take effect.